Hmm, not too many discussions on the games people are playing. Oh well, I’ll start.
As mentioned previously, I’m working through
Chocobo Mystery Dungeon in Japanese. For comparisons sake, I played the heck out of Rogue on my 8088 and also played through the DS remake of Shiren the Wanderer and a bit of one of the Early Pokémon Mystery Dungeons.
The story is very light (which is sort of expected, and suits me fine since I’m a Japanese novice).
The most interesting mechanic is that they adapted ATB to battle. So, you have an action gauge that fills. The enemies only ever attack when their bar fills, but you can execute your attack at any time to do some partial damage (e.g. if your bar is 90% full, your attack will do 90% damage). This actually makes things fairly interesting (and easier) in that you can attack right before the enemy’s gauge fills to try to defeat them before they launch their own. If you cast a spell, however, you have to wait for your gauge to fill before it executed.
I’m around dungeon level 8 at the moment, so I haven’t gotten any of the advanced spells or events yet. You can encounter a box where you place two unwanted items in and get a random item out. Stoves can combine two similar types of equipment and output an enchanted version (at the cost of a fire spell to light the stove)
Death has a minor penalty of being sent back to the start and losing a level. I haven’t died yet, so I don’t know if you lose your items.
You do need to identify your scrolls, potions and equipment (unlike Pokémon Mystery Dungeon,
thank god that made the game way too easy). You can find identify scrolls or pay someone in town to do it. A teleport card takes you back to town and you can unload some inventory (which is limited). If you return this way, you have the option of resuming the dungone on the level you left.
Overall, it’s a nice and gentle introduction to rogue-likes. The story is silly, which suits me fine. I recommend it if it sounds interesting to you! (There are translation patches if you want.)
If I have more to add later, I’ll be sure to do so!
Not saying I'll beat all of them (or any of them), but I'll give all of 'em a fair shake. These are my picks:
